Office 365 Home Premium Review

For the past several months, I’ve been using a pre-release version of Office 365 Home Premium, Microsoft’s new cloud service for consumers. Today, the product is available for trial and purchase in final form, and I can report that Office 365 Home Premium represents an amazing value, especially for families, thanks to Microsoft’s newly friendly licensing terms.

Folks, Office 365 Home Premium is pretty much a no-brainer for any family with multiple PCs. But let’s talk money right up front so you can see how this works.

In the past, a family’s best option was most likely Office Home & Student, which in previous versions provide three licenses for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for about $150. That uses what’s called a perpetual license, meaning you buy it once and use it as long as you want. Most Office customers tend to skip Office versions, so you might use this product for up to 5-6 years, the amount of time between, say, Office 2007 and Office 2013.

Office 365 costs $99.99 a year. So this product will of course cost a lot more than Office Home & Student over 5-6 years. But you also get more. It includes the equivalent of Office Professional 2013, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, but also Outlook, Publisher, and Access. That product costs $400, so a family of 5 would pay $2000 to use five of these installs over five years.

Too much? Perhaps it's more reasonable to assume one copy of Home & Student for the kids, at $140 a pop (now one license each, that’s how they get you), plus one or two copies of Professional at $400 each. Suddenly, the math starts to make sense: Two copies of Office Home & Student plus one copy of Office Professional would cost $680. That’s about seven full years of Office 365 Home Premium usage.

(On a related note, while you can still get Office preinstalled on new PCs, most PCs will utilize an Office 365 Home Premium trial now, instead of the old Office Starter product, which was discontinued. So while some may choose to pay extra to get a single copy of Office for just that PC, most, I think, will just use Office 365 Home Premium instead.)

But wait, there’s more. Office 365 Home Premium comes with many, many other benefits, and these, I think, puts this product over the top.

Multiple device types. Today, Office 365 Home Premium lets a family install the latest Office suite on up to 5 Windows PCs/devices and Macs. But in the future, this subscription will also include other device types. Microsoft isn’t talking yet for obvious reasons, but that has to include the iPad and probably Android tablets as well. Many families today have multiple device types, of course, and this subscription will in the future map nicely to these diverse technology uses.

Instant PC/device activiation/deactivation. That 5 PC/device limit isn’t hard and fast either. You can, in fact, deactivate any PC/device install of Office 2013 from the Office.com web portal and install the suite on any other PC/device, instantly. (That said, I’d like to see a way to pay more for additional licenses too.) On deactivated PCs, Office still works for reading documents, you just can't edit or save anymore. And you can reactivate that PC at any time and get back to work. Bonus.

Office On Demand. If you want to access any of the Office applications you’re already paying for, but aren’t using your own computer, you can do so using a cool technology called Office On Demand, which streams the application to any PC from Office.com, lets you use it normally and access and save documents to SkyDrive, and then uninstalls with no trace when you’re done. It’s like using HBO TO GO to watch an HBO series while you’re on the go, because you subscribe to the service back at home.

Extra SkyDrive storage. When you sign-up for Office 365 Home Premium, you do so with a Microsoft account, just as you sign into Windows 8/RT and Office 2013 with your Microsoft account. The account you use to create the Office 365 subscription will get an additional 20 GB of SkyDrive clouds storage for the lifetime of the subscription. (No, unfortunately, you can’t manage this storage and divvy it up with the other people installing Office in your household.)

Individual experiences. Speaking of which, while you do use a single Microsoft account to create an Office 365 subscription, each of the family members who installs Office on their own PCs will sign in with their own Microsoft account and get the personalized experience I wrote about recently, including their own settings sync, recent documents sync, SkyDrive access, and more.

Skype world calling minutes. You can sign into Skype with that Microsoft account, too, and the account used to create the Office 365 Home Premium subscription gets 60 free Skype world calling minutes per month, allowing you to call any mobile, landline or PC/device in the world.

Future upgrades. In the past, Microsoft would upgrade Office about once every three years and customers would upgrade to new Office versions once every 5-6 years. With Office 365 Home Premium, as with other Microsoft cloud services, Microsoft will be upgrading the products on a much faster timetable—I’m guessing quarterly at minimum—and you will receive these upgrades for free and automatically for the duration of your subscription. So when Office 2016 or whatever ships, you’ll get it, but then you will have received many other updates in the interim as well. This is a benefit that is hard to quantify, but the reason most people don’t upgrade to each Office revision now is the cost and complexity. These reasons no longer exist, unless of course you’re still buying Office the old-fashioned way. (Which, again, you can still do if the subscription doesn’t appeal to you.)

Office 365 Home Premium isn’t perfect, of course.

Depending on your needs, it may be more expensive than simply buying a normal Office retail product. This will be particularly true of individuals with no need for multiple device installs.

You cannot customize the Office install now, either, though Microsoft says it’s looking at changing this in the future. So when you install Office 2013 on a PC or device, you get the whole suite. If you didn’t want Access or Publisher, for example, there’s no way to configure it that way. You get all of it.

And you can’t pay more for additional licenses. If you need more, you need to buy another subscription, and you’ll need to do that from a different Microsoft account. This is a fringe use case, yes, but I know someone will ask about it.

Office 365 Home Premium is just a click away, you can purchase it or try it free for 30 days right now on Office.com. But as noted previously, it will also be available in trial form on new PCs, including Microsoft’s Surface Pro. You can also purchase it from over 100,000 resellers and over 450 retailers worldwide, including Best Buy, Staples, Dixons, FNAC, Challenger, Amazon.com, and the Microsoft Store.

While there will always be the subscription doubters and those who simply don’t need this much Office, I feel that this product is a no-brainer for families and others with multiple PCs and devices. And I can give Office 365 Home Premium the best possible rating: I’m using it myself, as is my family. This is a tremendous offering, a win-win for both Microsoft and its consumer customers. And you just don’t get to say that very often. Highly recommended for the target audience.

I have a lot more to say about Office 365 Home Premium and Office 2013. Stay tuned.

Discuss this Article 69

I signed up and after a rocky start that demanded I delete my windows user profile and recreate it, I'm quite enjoying it.

I'm a little disappointed with the online versions though. Why (for example) does it not highlight the cells affected when I'm editing a formula in the online Excel? Why these little essentials are being left out is beyond me.

After taking the plunge, and buying the subscription, I find out that Outlook 2013 cannot store the .pst file in the "cloud" (Skydrive), so all Outlook data cannot be shared among Office 360 devices. That´s a disappointment, to say the least.

You are not thinking about this clearly, or correctly. The PST file is a vestige of the past.

The services you connect to--email, etc.--are in the cloud. Outlook 2013 works like any other mobile client, showing you a view of this data. The truth is in the cloud, not in your PST file.

Office settings sync through your Microsoft account. So you could sign in to Outlook on another PC and get all your relevant settings, and all your accounts, with the same views to the same data. You do not want or need a PST file to "sync" through the cloud. That is just an old-fashioned way of looking at this.

Three reasons why the .pst is important -or indispensable- for me: 1) My main email service is Gmail, and I know that there could be more or less convoluted ways to switch to outlook.com, but it certainly is not straightforward, and it certainly is not well documented, if documented at all, 2) I have possibly 10 years worth of saved emails, all organized in their own folders that live in the .pst file, 3) I wouldn´t know what to do with my "Archive" folders. All-in-all a big mess to I even think of moving away from my .pst file. I wouldn´t even know where to start to take care of all these issues.

Agreed. I have every e-mail sent and received since the 90's and my .pst file is over 5Gb, so Skydrive won't accept it.

Question for Paul: What happens if/when you drop your annual subscription? With Adobe, you lose your software. Since Autodesk and Adobe software is not backward compatible, it seems to me you're screwed. The only thing preventing me from signing on is my dependence on Outlook. If Outlook no longer uses the .pst files, how do you transfer/import Outlook 2010 email/contacts over to Outlook 2013? I realize you discussed transferring, some time ago, Outlook files/contacts over to hotmail/google email accounts but this is different? Can you retain your "hard copy" MS Office 2010?

Paul, I noticed that the home premium 2013 subscription installs next to, instead of over, office 2010. Would you recommend uninstalling 2010 after the install? My main unit has plenty of space, but my Zenbook does not. what affect will that have if any?

Am I able to have a shared calendar with 365 home premium?
My wife and I are really disappointed that we have lost that ability.
We were using Google Apps business for the calendar syced using Outlook, but it's not compatible with Office 365.
Any workarounds out there?

This is an incredibly tough sell for me. I have 2007 (which saves to the newer file formats) and SkyDrive. Right now, I can create/edit files locally from my desktop and then access them and even edit them on the web. It even works pretty well from my iPad, although I would prefer native apps. Is that functionality going away?

I prefer this solution to Google's because I need to have a local file stored on my home system for backup elsewhere. I would consider Google's solution if the files were stored locally instead of just shortcuts.

I feel as though MS is competing as much with itself (from the past) than it is with Google.

The problem with both Office 365 Home Premium and the forthcoming Office 365 Small Business Premium is that neither of them truly fits my needs. I have an iMac at the house that I purchased and an iMac at my office that was purchased by my employer, but both of them are basically mine. My coworker took the iMac that was provided for him when he moved. I'm not sure I would do that if I were to leave, but I probably could. I use both machines the same way. I do my work on both of them, and I also do personal stuff on both of them.

Home Premium doesn't work for me because of the restrictions on commercial and non-profit use. The later of the two is probably the most accurate description of my work. Even if it's okay to do work with Home Premium at home (I'm still not convinced that it is based on the wording of the license), I really can't see any way that it would be okay to use the Home Premium license at my office -- even if I purchased it myself. I often do that kind of thing. For example, I've purchased iWork, Mountain Lion, and a number of other programs that I choose to use in my work. I would likely pay $99 a year if I could do the same with Office, but I can't see how it would fit the license.

Small Business Premium isn't any better. I don't need any of the stuff that sets Small Business Premium apart from Home Premium. In fact, I'd rather have the 20gb of SkyDrive storage that comes with Home Premium. That actually appeals to me, and I would likely use it. Right now I keep everything synced between the two computers using Google Drive. I'm not violating any kind of company policies in doing so. All of my work is MY work. I don't have to collaborate with anyone, and it all goes with me when I leave. It doesn't belong to a company. So I store it wherever I want. Why would I want to pay $150/year for something that does a worse job of meeting my needs than a product that costs $99/year?

Actually, I'm sure Microsoft would expect me to pay $150/year for Office 365 at work, and also another $99/year at home because other family members may need it as well. Small Business Premium may be for up to five devices but only one person.

For me, Office 365 is a complete failure. I'd really like to use Office, but iWork actually meets my needs just fine. It's beginning to look like the best option for me.

I've been trying to find out how to add Visio 2013 to my Office 365 Home Premium subscription. Despite posts on several MS forums, I can't get a straight answer. At the moment I'm using a two month trial of Visio 2013 and don't know what other options I have except purchasing the full Visio product. I'd prefer it as a subscription like the rest of the Office 365 suite.

Most people buying this do not know what they are getting, and in a year when they have to pay again or it stops working, they will hit the roof! Most of the public still thinks that Word and Excel are parts of Windows, and some don't believe me when I explain that they are sold separately in something called Microsoft Office. The computer they use at work has those, and a home computer should, too.

The sad thing is a lot of software producers such as Adobe and others will go to this subscription model if possible as that does generate more revenue over time. People's tech subscriptions bills for apps and games may surpass their cable bill in the future. In 5 years you may be writing about why can't we just buy a license outright like it was done in 2012.

I am trialling it now and as a value for money product it is excellent. However the interface has issues. White or 2 shades of grey as the only menu colour options. Along side Office 2010 it looks drab and then there is the SHOUTY ALL CAPS menu. At least in Visual Studio they eventually gave the option of turning this off in Office 365/2013 you have to rename the tabs to get get rid of the shout (although the FILE option remains loud). Minor issues yes but enough in this case to make me seriously consider not using it beyond the trial.